California counties slow to sign on to all-mail elections

1of5Mail-in ballots are placed in bins to be processed after arriving at the Sacramento County Registrar of Voters on Oct. 22.Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

2of5Above: Mikka Kelly votes at the San Francisco Columbarium and Funeral Home polling station in 2018. More voting centers with computer access to county election offices are being opened. Below: Election clerk Sachi Manalisay sorts mail-in ballots at San Francisco City Hall in 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle 2018

3of5Election clerk Sachi Manalisay sorts mail-in ballots at City Hall in San Francisco in 2016. California counties have been slow to sign on to an all-mail-in ballot voting system.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle 2016

5of5Workers process ballots inside the tabulation room at the Department of Elections in San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday, June 7, 2018.Photo: Stephen Lam / Special to The Chronicle

Californians will be holding on to their neighborhood polling places for a while longer, despite last year’s successful introduction of a system that sends a mail ballot to every registered voter.

In the June and November elections, Sacramento was one of five California counties that replaced its polling places with a much smaller number of full-service voting centers and moved closer to an all-mail-ballot election. In the Nov. 6 vote, the county saw the highest turnout for a midterm election in its history.

“I think this is the best option for Sacramento County,” said Courtney Bailey-Kanelos, the county’s registrar of voters.

All five of the initial counties — Sacramento, San Mateo, Napa, Madera and Nevada — beat the state turnout average, said Sam Mahood, a spokesman for Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who helped push the Voter’s Choice Act through the Legislature in 2017.

“This is a good template to show other counties how well (the voting system) can work,” Mahood said. The 2018 election “was a good first effort.”

But even though Padilla once talked about how the entire state could switch to vote centers and universal mail ballots by the 2020 presidential elections, that’s not likely to happen.

So far, only Los Angeles, Orange and Mariposa counties have joined that first group of counties and signed on to the new system. That has forced state election officials to seriously downsize their expectations.

“We’re hoping for at least 10 counties in 2020,” Mahood said. “The Voter’s Choice Act is voluntary, and different counties have different considerations of staffing and financing.”

The local priorities also can be different, said John Arntz, San Francisco’s election chief.

“Right now we need to get new voting (machines) in place for the November (local) elections,” he said. “City officials haven’t indicated any interest in moving forward” on the Voter’s Choice Act changes.

In some cases, there have been partisan concerns. Republicans, who have control of many of the state’s small, rural counties, suspect that efforts by Padilla and other Democrats to register more voters are aimed at attracting young and minority voters, who tend to back Democrats.

In San Mateo County, for example, more than 200 local polling places were replaced by 39 voting centers, with all of them open four days before the election and a handful up and ready for business 28 days before the vote.

The centers are nothing like the tiny, low-tech voting booths typically set up in school cafeterias and neighbors’ garages. Instead, each center has a direct computer link to the county election office, enabling workers to instantly check a voter’s registration and print out the proper ballot.

The ability to cast a ballot at any voting center in the county is a boon to both voters and election officials, said Bailey-Kanelos, the Sacramento registrar.

In the past, anyone who tried to vote outside their precinct had to use a provisional ballot, as did anyone who lost or mismarked a mail ballot or decided they wanted to vote in person instead of by mail. But vote center workers could make those changes immediately, as well as ensure that “each voter was able to cast only one ballot because any other ballot would instantaneously be voided,” Bailey-Kanelos said in a Jan. 29 letter to the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors.

There were 33,333 provisional ballots cast in Sacramento County in the November 2016 presidential election. That number dropped to 587 last November, dramatically reducing the time it takes election officials to deal with questionable ballots.

Workers at the voting centers also can register voters and let them vote immediately. In Sacramento County, there were 11,047 of those same-day conditional voter registrations in November. In San Mateo County, there were 5,029.

Other changes in the voting system aren’t as dramatic as they might seem. While every voter, like it or not, gets a mail ballot under the Voter’s Choice Act in participating counties, California was already well on its way all-mail elections before counties began to implement the new system.

In Napa, for example, about 90 percent of voters cast ballots by mail in 2016. Statewide, 58 percent of voters did so.

With the explosive growth of voting by mail, polling places in many counties are lonely spots on election day.

“We had polling places where only four people would come in to cast ballots,” said Sacramento’s Bailey-Kanelos. “That’s using a lot of resources for not a lot of people.”

It’s a different story in San Francisco, which is one reason the city isn’t among the counties making the switch just yet.

“About 35 percent of our votes were cast at polling places last November and another 50,000 to 60,000 mail ballots were dropped off there,” said Arntz, the city election chief. “They actually get a lot of use.”

Arntz said he’s looking at the experiences other counties have had with the new system and isn’t ruling out San Francisco’s involvement, especially in a hybrid effort that uses both voting centers and some polling places.

Despite the slow acceptance of Padilla’s plan to modernize California’s elections, the effort is moving in the right direction, said Mahood of the secretary of state’s office.

“As time goes on, we’ll see more counties interested, especially with the success in the past election,” he said.

John Wildermuth is a native San Franciscan who has worked as a reporter and editor in California for more than 40 years and has been with the San Francisco Chronicle since 1986. For most of his career, he has covered government and politics. He is a former assistant city editor and Peninsula bureau chief with The Chronicle and currently covers politics and San Francisco city government.